Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [188]
“And what does that tell you?”
“We gotta make the most of it!”
Alice smiled. “I agree.”
“Can I ask something else?”
“Sure.”
“How you pronounce that one?” Anthony pointed at the skull shaped like a hammer’s head.
“Homo heidelbergensis. Why?”
“’cause she looks just like Eugene’s mom.”
Like a firework, the class burst from the middle, the boys and girls covering their mouths as they ran laughing from the center. Alice shook her head at Anthony, who stood facing her. “You’ll never change,” she said.
It was time to eat.
Alice led the kids down to the lunchrooms on the lower level. Pepin couldn’t help stopping in the food court to buy a chicken and Swiss wrap, which he snarfed down, looking over his shoulder all the while, like a hunter being hunted. Alice was sitting at a table off to the side, away from students and the other teachers, her eyes glazed; she appeared saddened, even decimated, the woman he knew emerging now that no young people were engaging her immediate attention and yanking her out of her own mind. She seemed in despair, and this was the best time to tell her, he thought, his best opportunity for success. Let her know he was here and why he had to take her away. He was about to walk toward her when he saw Mobius standing at the end of the hall.
Rather than run, he turned when Pepin approached and walked down the hallway leading to the 81st Street subway station, then ducked left into the men’s bathroom. There was a yellow folding sign in front of the door, with a figure whose feet were sliding out from underneath him and CAUTION painted in red.
The tiled room, smelling of ancient urine, was empty but for the two of them.
“You’re making this unnecessarily difficult,” Mobius said.
“That’s the idea.”
Like Alice’s student, he was dressed all in black, though his form-fitting clothes were made for athletics, with the same Under Armour logo at his neck as Alice’s top the night before: U locked with inverted U.
“But you can’t stop it,” he said. “The end’s already determined. I’m just following the beginning’s vector—the arrow’s arc. And you dreamed that part, remember? You called me.”
Pepin looked around for a weapon. There was a trash can in the corner, silver, shaped like a bullet. Throwing that at Mobius would be very troglodyte. “So what happens now?” he said.
“We fight, I knock you out, you come to. You realize some things that make this really tragic. There’s a little more after that, but I don’t want to spoil it.”
Pepin stepped forward, took a swing, and whiffed. He’d never hit anyone in his life and still hadn’t. Mobius’s black eyes glinted but didn’t blink.
Pepin swung again, losing his balance and falling forward with the miss, sliding on the floor.
Mobius had him by the neck in a flash, straddling his back and pushing his face against the white-tiled wall. “Go to sleep,” he said.
He felt a blow.
Pepin woke.
The back of his neck was sore, his forehead too, and he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. But he was up, if unsteadily, on his feet and out the door into the lunchroom, but Alice and the class had already left. Panicked again, he ran upstairs, through the Grand Gallery and the New York State Environment and the Hall of North American Forests and into the Hall of Ocean Life, its entrance guarded by three sharks.
The blue whale took his remaining breath away, gigantic, hanging there impossibly as if it were floating in the sea. And in this sea-blue room, feeling as submerged beneath the ceiling’s domed blue glass as if he’d just walked onto the deck of the Nautilus itself, he saw Alice and her students wandering along the jeweled dioramas in the hall’s recessed level, and then his pants pocket vibrated. It was a cell phone—another plant—and now it rang.
He saw Mobius watching him from across the walkway.
“Remember the beginning?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Of your book,” Mobius said. “‘There was Alice, underneath the wreckage. Either she was killed instantly or Pepin was there, right by her side, inserted just before the fatal moment. He held her hand, they exchanged